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It’s been my rote answer to almost every meaningful question over the last year or more.

What do you want? I don’t know. How do you feel? I don’t know. Where are you headed? I. Don’t. Know.

From a metaphysical point of view, I’ve been shoveling other people’s videos, audios, writings into my head since my teenage years. With the explosion of the Internet and the massive amount of information that is available at our fingertips about any and every conceivable topic, I’m reaching critical overload. I may have already tripped the breaker; the question is, do I want to reset it?

I’ve been trying to meditate more over the last several weeks. It was going good for awhile, but lately I’m finding myself too frustrated to pay sufficient attention. The more frustrated I get, the less I can meditate; the less I meditate, the more frustrated I get. It’s a self-sustaining cycle. As the frustration builds, I find myself falling back into the habit of researching.

I’m a junkie addicted to the compiling of information, the assimilation of data. An information binge eater. I can’t just sample it, I must gorge myself on everything I can find on a topic and then, unsurprisingly, find myself completely burned out at the end. Binge eating fills a void. Everyone’s void is different but the key to getting a handle on it is the same: find out what the void is and find a better way to fill it, repair it. Information binge eating is exactly the same, driven by the same need to fill a psychological or metaphysical void. It goes hand-in-hand with many aspects of hoarding (in that bingeing on information frequently includes stockpiling books, videos, digital content, and what not) and brings along much of the same baggage. For me, the metaphysical bingeing derives at least partly from this need to fill the huge questioning void in my soul, as though someone else holds the key to my own spiritual quest, when a quest by its very nature is personal and individual and something only you can undertake.

It’s really time that I started looking within for my answers, instead of expecting to find the answers to my own personal questions and crises in someone else’s words. To do that, I really need to be more conscientious about meditating and using other inward-facing tools like journaling. My dreams have been particularly vivid lately so I want to start recording those where I can remember them. Just take an inner journey of my own instead of reading about other people’s mystical travels. I may have to avoid the Internet for awhile to do that.

[As an aside, today, while napping in between stretches of watching the new Bob Marley documentary, I had a dream in which I told a man who looked like a young Bill Gates that there were people out there with both a deep understanding of the metaphysical nature of the universe and a great affinity with technology and that he should go find them, actively go out there and search for them, because they were the future. It seemed important enough to me that I kept repeating the words every time I woke up briefly in order that I wouldn’t forget when I finally got up. (Didn’t quite work out, since I forgot some of the specific words, but the gist and images of it remained. I also forgot something Bob Marley himself said in the dreams, something I’d also thought was important but clearly not as important. LOL)]

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It’s funny how things start to fall into place once you open yourself up to the possibilities and to meaningful coincidences.

I’ve been on a spiritual quest for most of my post-pubescent life. Interestingly enough, the start of the quest coincided with the start of my lifelong battle with clinical depression, back in about 1981 or so. My beliefs are somewhat fluid with one big exception: I have issues with organized religions of any kind. I had initally thought I was just rebelling against the Christianity I grew up with, I’ve since discovered that I have trouble supporting any religion as The One Truth. Mostly because I don’t believe there is just one truth — I think we’re all trying to understand and connect with the same thing. Religions, even the most tolerant ones, at their cores serve to bring groups of people together in a common bond while at the same time separating the groups more and more from each other. But I digress.

My spiritual exploration has been fitful, consisting of periods of intense study and frantic purpose interspersed with longer periods of essentially being asleep, absent from all but the basics of life: eat, sleep, work… lather, rinse, repeat… The periods of wakefulness are usually sudden and are triggered by something external to me. And during all of them, I’ve experienced meaningful coincidences, instances where the hand of the universe is discernable. Before I moved here, I was endlessly slogging through contract job after contract job, with ample unemployment between. Depression was heavy. I’d been stubbornly refusing to give in and move somewhere with better job prospects for so long and the state of my life reflected the struggle. When I finally made the decision to move here, everything seemed to fall into place, quickly. Another time, I was unsure about where to go next, spiritually. At the time I was working in customer service and our phones were never silent, especially at the end of the day when I was usually manning the phones alone. One evening, another department manager stopped by my desk and we began to chat. We ended up chatting about spiritual exploration for about an hour, an hour during which the phone never rang. She gave me information about the meditation class that I mentioned previously (the one that led me to Caroline Myss’s works) and essentially provided me with the push I needed to keep travelling down the path. It came at the exact right time, and it underscored for me that you need to be open to what the universe has to offer or you’ll miss it.

I’ve felt the same thing happening over the last couple of years, more intensely in the past year leading up to now, though I don’t always pay attention as I should.

Today’s little meaningful coincidence: I visited songdeva‘s blog as a result of the comment she posted in one of yesterday’s posts. She hasn’t posted much recently (I hope she’ll keep posting now that she’s started again) but her older posts are a treasure trove of spiritual guidance. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of them. Skipping past the crochet posts (I can’t crochet to save my life, though I can macramé), I ended up at Guideposts for your Spiritual Path (Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening, Part II), which in turn led me to Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening: A List. It’s an interesting list, some of which I recognize in me and some of which I haven’t yet experienced. The original author of the list, Ellen L. Montgomery, appears to have dropped off the face of the planet (or at least the surface of the Internet). Her old home page no longer exists and there doesn’t seem to be an alternative. The phone number that was on her site is now registered to someone else. And the only references to her that I can find are other people reproducing the Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening: A List article that she wrote. Thank God for the Wayback Machine. There, you can browse the other articles she’d written for her newsletter (her original version of the Symtoms article is also available and an updated version is in the archive of her other — and also defunct — site). I found myself at Things Fall Into Place, a 1998 article about synchronicity. 1998, incidentally, was around the time of that chat I mentioned earlier.